Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Barbara Nolan, author of the new Year of Pagan Prayer. Our modern month of October was an in-between time in the ancient Pagan world, a period of both endings and beginnings. To the insular Pagan Celts, it was the end of the year, before Samhain ushered in both the last of the harvest and the beginning of a new cycle of time. For Pagans in the Mediterranean world, it was a time when the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone were honored at the Thesmophoria (thez-mo-FOR-ee-uh), a Greek women's festival that seems to have celebrated both the harvest and the sowing of future crops, which could take place more or less together in Greece.